Patterns and Politics
Claudia HartPatterns and Politics is the first museum retrospective of American media artist Claudia Hart. Since the mid-1990s, she has been constructing complex scenarios in various 3D programs in which mathematical structures, scientific models and the visual language of consumer culture merge. This results in mythologically charged worlds in which virtual bodies, ornamentation and cyclical and historical processes are inextricably interwoven.
A virtual camera captures these spaces and the resulting render sequences form the basis for Hart's films, installations, pigment prints, sculptures, quilts, augmented reality wallpapers and paintings. The result is a visual cosmos in which scientific systems of thought, historical narratives and questions about perception, the body, identity and power intertwine.
Produced on the occasion of "Patterns and Politics," the first museum retrospective of American media artist Claudia Hart. Since the mid-1990s, she has been constructing complex scenarios in various 3D programs in which mathematical structures, scientific models and the visual language of consumer culture merge.
Julia Staudach and I laboriously researched this exhibition. My job was to sort through the dozens of boxes filled with art stored in my basement, many of which I could barely remember. One was a cardboard tube, in which I found these three photographs. I could not remember how they came to be there, so I looked through my library of catalogs and found one for a show called Fetish: Human Fantastic, organized by the curator Michele Thursz, active around the millenium and I also the first to work with the cultural shifts that MIGHT be engendered by the computer. None had happened yet, and computer culture was at that time still far from ubiquitous.
Michele and I were intellectual partners-in-crime, talking at length about what the future might bring. The 2002 catalog was for an exhibit that was held at the Borusan Culture and Art Center in Istanbul. Ahmet Kocabıyık, the honorary Chairman of the board of directors of the Borusan Holding Company, also sponsored the Borusan Cultural Center in 2002, has since become one of the major collectors of digital art, with a private museum in Istanbul that collects my animations. I remembered then, that these photos were a gift from one of his board members, whose name I am still unable to recall. They are very early examples of digitally-produced photo prints. What I do remember, is that he was a successful industrialist and also a skilled photographer, fascinated by what was then a novel process.